Thanks to genetic modification, the dream of the first perfect generation has finally been realized. But not everyone is happy about the scientific breakthrough... Octavia is an Elite girl with the wrong dress size, shape, and coloring. Nothing about her is fashionable. She dreams of working as a nurse rather than shopping and socializing. She is continually at odds with her mother, who is willing to suffer anything to meet the beauty standard. Even a proposal from one of the Elite's most prestigious young men is not enough to spare Octavia from her mother's regimen of strenuous dieting, and body-altering clothing. Brandon is too pretty and tall to be the average middle-class boy. He finds life as a farmer's son boring, and spends late nights at the Pits fighting to make extra money or spreading seditious papers around the slums, all to turn the head of a pretty girl. He enlists in the military to escape, but quickly learns it's not the adventure he was looking for. Though polar opposites, these nineteen-year-olds have two unique things in common: their lack of beauty standard compliance, and they were switched at birth. When the switch is discovered and rectified, Brandon and Octavia must learn to adjust to their new lots in life. But a mutual acquaintance has other plans for the two citizens, and will use their changes in class to fuel a revolution.